From ATLAS Around the World: First blog from Hong Kong

Part of the Hong Kong team in a group meeting at CERN. Photo courtesy Prof. Luis Flores Castillo. (Image: CERN)

Guess who ATLAS’s youngest member is? It’s Hong Kong! We will be celebrating our first birthday in June, 2015. The Hong Kong ATLAS team comprises members from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), operating under the umbrella of the Joint Consortium for Fundamental Physics formed in 2013 by physicists in the three universities. We have grown quite a bit since 2014. There are now four faculty members, two postdocs, two research assistants, and six graduate students in our team. In addition, five undergraduates from Hong Kong will spend a summer in Geneva at the CERN Summer Program. You can’t miss us if you are at CERN this summer (smile and say hi to us please)!

While half of our team is stationed at CERN, taking shifts and working on Higgs property analysis, SUSY searches, and muon track reconstruction software, the other half is working in Hong Kong on functionality, thermal, and radiation tests on some components of the muon system readout electronics, in collaboration with the University of Michigan group. We have recently secured funds to set up a Tier-2 computing center for ATLAS in Hong Kong, and we may work on ATLAS software upgrade tasks as well.

The humble telescope I used at high school pointed me both to the past and to the future. Photo courtesy Tat Hung Wan. (Image: CERN)

I have also been actively participating in education and outreach activities in Hong Kong. In October last year, I have invited two representatives from Hong Kong Science Museum to visit CERN, so that they can obtain first-hand information on its operation and the lives and work of students and scientists. This will help them to plan an exhibition there on CERN and LHC in 2016. The timing is just right to bring the excitement with the restart of the LHC to Hong Kong.

I have been giving talks on particle physics and cosmology for students and the general public. The latest one was just two weeks ago, for the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth School, where I was a student myself many years ago. So many memories came back to me! I was an active member of the astronomy club and a frequent user of the very modest telescope we had. I knew back then the telescope is a time machine that brings images of the past to our eyes.

How fortunate I am now, to be a user of the LHC and ATLAS, the ultimate time machine, and a member of the ATLAS community studying the most fundamental questions about the universe. Even though the young students in the audience might find it difficult to understand everything we do, they can certainly feel our excitement in our quest for the scientific truth.

Secondary school students in Hong Kong after a popular science talk on particle. (Image: CERN)

About the author

Ming-chung Chu is a professor at the Department of Physics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He did his undergraduate and graduate studies both at Caltech. After some years of postdoc at MIT and Caltech, he went back to Hong Kong in 1995, where he was born and grew up. h proud to have helped bring particle physics to Hong Kong.

Disclaimer: The views expressed do not represent the official position of ATLAS but the personal views of the author.